📚 OpenCitations Scraper

🚀 Extract citation networks and bibliographic metadata from OpenCitations in seconds. Search by DOI, PMID, or OMID. No coding, no API keys required.

OpenCitations is an open scholarly infrastructure providing free access to citation data from millions of academic publications. This scraper collects citation relationships, self-citation flags, and optional bibliographic metadata (authors, titles, venues, publication dates) for any publication identified by DOI, PubMed ID, or OpenCitations Meta ID. Choose between citations mode (who cited this work) and references mode (what this work cites) to map research influence in either direction.

Researchers, bibliometric analysts, and data scientists use this actor to build citation networks, track research impact, identify self-citations, and analyze how knowledge flows between publications. Instead of querying the OpenCitations API manually and parsing responses, you get clean, structured data exported as JSON, CSV, or Excel. With metadata enabled, every record includes the citing and cited entity IDs, creation date, timespan, self-citation flags, plus the full title, authors, publication date, venue, and publisher.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Use Cases
Bibliometric analysts	Map citation networks and measure impact
Academic researchers	Track who cites your publications
University administrators	Evaluate research impact for departments
Science policy makers	Analyze knowledge flow between institutions
Data scientists	Build citation graph datasets for analysis
Librarians	Enrich catalog records with citation data

📋 What the OpenCitations Scraper does

• 🔍 DOI-based search to find citations or references for any published work
• 🆔 PMID support for biomedical publications indexed in PubMed
• 📋 OMID support for OpenCitations internal identifier lookups
• 🔄 Bidirectional search with citations (incoming) and references (outgoing) modes
• 📊 Self-citation detection with flags for author and journal self-citations
• 📝 Optional metadata including titles, authors, venues, and publication dates

The scraper queries the OpenCitations API with your identifier and search type, retrieves all matching citation relationships, and extracts structured data for each record. When metadata is enabled, it also fetches detailed bibliographic information for each citing or cited work. Results include unique citation identifiers (OCI), entity IDs, creation dates, timespans, self-citation flags, and full publication metadata.

💡 Why it matters: Manually collecting citation data from OpenCitations involves API queries, pagination, and metadata enrichment. This scraper handles everything automatically, delivering structured citation networks ready for analysis, visualization, or integration with other research tools.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: authorSelfCitation, authors, cited, citing, creation, editor, id, issue, journalSelfCitation, oci, page, publicationDate, publisher, scrapedTimestamp, timespan, title, type, venue, volume. All 19 field names come from a real production run, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: Provide one identifier (DOI, PMID, or OMID), not multiple. Enabling metadata makes the scraper slower but provides full bibliographic details for each citation. The default search type is "citations" (incoming citations).

🚀 How to use

1. Create an Apify account - Sign up free with $5 credit
2. Open the OpenCitations Scraper - Navigate to the actor page on Apify
3. Enter a DOI, PMID, or OMID - Provide the identifier for the publication you want to analyze
4. Choose search type and options - Select citations or references mode and enable metadata if needed
5. Click Start - The actor collects citation relationships and delivers structured data

⏱️ A typical run with 50 citations completes in under 1 minute.

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💡 Pro Tip: Combine the OpenCitations Scraper with the Crossref Scraper to get both citation networks and full publication metadata for each cited work.

Disclaimer: This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to OpenCitations. It accesses publicly available data through the OpenCitations API. Use responsibly and in accordance with applicable terms of service.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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